Just wanted to update this. I finally got a speaker for the rear center channel (not quite what I wanted but close). Volia the probem with signal dropout and volume dropout for the surround channels went away. The viewing overall experience was very good. My oldest daughter couldn't believe the difference. She had thought the DVD was defective and asked if I had finally returned it and got one that worked. And this was before I did any calibration.

I can only assume that Outlaw is still "working" on this problem for 5.1 decoding.